MFA in Interaction Design: Home

Blog

  1. Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 and future of design education

    The Manifesto 2011 in Spanish

    Department chair Liz Danzico was a steering committee member and contributor to the update to the update, which launched during the Icograda General Assembly 24 in Taipei this October. Liz was joined on the committee by Hugh Dubberly, Steven Heller, Jamer Hunt, Dave Malouf, Victor Margolin, Lita Talarico, and sixteen other members of the Icograda network, who have each written a 1,000-word essay on the future of design education.

    The Design Education Manifesto 2011 is manifest of a 2-year-long process engaging some of the most prominent design education experts from around the world. The final output addresses the needs and desires of the future of design education in a world both converging and expanding,” said Omar Vulpinari, Icograda President Elect and Co-chair of the Manifesto update.

    2011 marks the 10-year anniversary of the Manifesto’s publication, and the 2009-2011 Icograda Executive Board resolved to update it, its intention being “to help steer design curriculum and equip faculty and students to handle current and future issues in design education.”

    The Icograda Design Education Manifesto, a key legacy of Oullim, is a core document that defines Icograda’s position on design education. The Manifesto advocates that design education must be a learning-centred environment, enabling students to develop their potential in and beyond academic programs.

    The Icograda Design Education Manifesto was developed in 2000 as collaboration by an international group of designers. Participants represented a geographically, politically, economically, culturally, and socially diverse cross section of the design education community. Prof. Ahn Sang-Soo (South Korea) led the project which was translated into seventeen languages and presented at the Icograda Millennium Congress Oullim 2000 Seoul.

    Read more and download the manifesto here.

  2. In the span of a click: Prachi Pundeer

    Each week, Interaction Design’s Social Media Officer Cooper Smith will curate a story from the incoming first-year class. This week’s post comes from Prachi Pundeer.

    Three months passed like three weeks. There were lectures, projects, group meetings, museum visits, workshops, first-year special Thursday nights, a party night-out and several project night-outs, Interaction Salons, presentations, and final critiques. So while I wrap up my first semester here and prepare for one final week of presentations, here’s what it looked like through the lens of my Nikon D40.


    –Prachi Pundeer

  3. Liz Danzico in .net Magazine

    Department chair, co-founder, and faculty member Liz Danzico was interviewed for this month’s issue of .net magazine, discussing her views on education and learning, and the need for curiosity and improvisation.

    The December 2011 cover.

    A spread from the interview.

    “At .net magazine, we get a lot of emails from web design students expressing dissatisfaction with their courses. That may be the nature of the beast – people don’t often contact the press to tell them how content they are – but the number of complaints is striking. And when I mention this to Liz Danzico, chair and co-founder of the MFA in Interaction Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts, there’s no surprise in her reaction: she’s heard a lot of similar comments herself.

    Danzico’s course, though, takes a different approach. Although many of those who enroll are interested in pursuing web design, the syllabus is less about coding and specific web technologies and more about a wider design philosophy.

    Interaction Design is about observing and designing for the relationship between people over time”, [Liz] explains. “That could be how it feels to swipe between screens on an iPad or iPhone, or something as simple as the way a door communicates to you that it’s push or pull.” Rather than just building homepages, her students get to do things such as experiment with prototyping products, using everything from woodworking to 3D printers.

    Even when they do tackle coding, it’s not what you’d expect. “The coding class doesn’t actually touch a screen or any kind of device for three or four weeks,” Danzico explains. “So they learn about variables and loops and the logic of code programming in paper format. Among humans. That way, they learn about decision making. And so when they go to actually design for a mobile device or a website, that foundational knowledge they have about how the things work give them a much richer sense in terms of larger system.”

    It’s a radical approach that offers wide horizons and rewards an open mind. “It’s not a vocational course,” stresses Danzico. “My students are more interested in the way that interaction design can influence their thinking such that they can apply that to other areas. That may be someone who ultimately wants to go into web design, or someone who’s already a web designer who wants to move into other areas.”

    It’s not a unique concept, but it is a rarity. “There are a couple of universities in the States that teach interaction design and a handful in Europe, in Scandinavia,” Danzico explains. “Even for a small narrow field they’re all quite different.” One thing that marks out her course is that all the faculty members work in the industry.

    What’s truly fascinating to Danzico is the crosspollination of disciplines that takes place. “You have to consider how this person, who’s studied neuroscience and fine arts, but who now wants to be an interaction designer, is going to work with the industrial designer, who’s always been a practitioner. It’s the mingling of completely different cultures. They all have the same kind of ideas but such different reference points.”

    Continue reading in the December 2011 issue of .net Magazine.

  4. Here and Now: Sana Rao

    Each week, Interaction Design’s Social Media Officer Cooper Smith will curate a story from the incoming first-year class. This week’s post comes from Sana Rao.

    Here and Now

    When friends and relatives ask me what this program is about, this program that made one leave all the beauty and comforts of being in one’s own country to stay abroad for such an extended period of time, I am often at a loss to explain.

    The weight of the phrase “Interaction Design,” strikes me as an obstacle.

    Below I answer questions I have been asked by parents, friends, prospective students, and my bewildered twin sister about what interaction design and this program mean to me, and how all the previous decisions in my life have led me here, now, to the MFA Interaction Design Program at SVA.

    First, a deep motivation for inquiry and an incessant need to understand the immense variety of human relationships drove me to writing, to reading, and to design.
    I believe it is this need for inquiry that defines why most designers wake up every morning.

    For me, interaction design examines human relationships, the media we use to communicate what is, but a thought, our reactions to our world, the one within us, and everything in between. It is an ever-expanding and always-flexible thread that binds all the conversations which we have with the world around us.

    And now a brief glimpse at the toolkit this Program equips us with. The first and most accessible resource are the fellow students. Each is a uniquely talented individual with expertise in a variety of fields, spanning molecular biology, management information systems, and even economics, and it is fascinating to see the ideas that take shape out of the braiding of such backgrounds. In my brief time here, I have already begun to value and be continuously amazed by the diversity of ideas that come out of the permutations of our collaborations with each other.

    In addition, each course in the first semester is designed to not just give us a succinct knowledge of basic interaction design tools, but also to give us a window to entire fields of design thinking, giving us the freedom to evaluate and choose a combination that best reflects our preferred way of working. In each of these courses, we are encouraged to work on issues that appeal to us individually and close to our hearts. What I find the most intriguing about our schedules however, is that in any given week, my mind is challenged to change modes from high-level systems thinking, to strategic business-oriented thinking, to a more detailed code thinking.

    I am still discovering where I stand in the world of interaction design and constantly evolving my personal definition, and hope it remains evolving as I move ahead with the program and beyond.

    –Sana Rao

  5. Project: Interaction on AIGA Design Envy

    Project: Interaction, the 10-week after school program founded by alumni Katie Koch and Carmen Dukes from was featured on AIGA’s Design Envy blog today.

    So much has been said about using technology to revive middle and high school education in America. But what about teaching technology? Or teaching design? As it turns out, it’s not just a way to spark education, but also a way to positively enact social change through disrupting social patterns and expectations.

  6. Fonderie 47 in The New York Times

    Earrings by Fonderie 47.

    Fonderie 47, an organization founded by faculty John Zapolski and partner Peter Thum was featured in The New York Times.

    “We saw the AK-47 as an opportunity because it’s such a successful design,” [Peter] said. “It’s something that’s globally recognizable. What better way to turn things around than with this object, which represents so many things ugly, and turn it into something beautiful?”

    So Mr. Thum and Mr. Zapolski set up Fonderie 47. The partners acquired AK-47s that the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo had confiscated from its North Kivu Province. The receivers, barrels and other steel components were melted down and reconfigured with gold into designs by the jewelers Philip Crangi and Roland Iten.